The Art of Compromise

To compromise is to make a deal where someone gives up part of, or all of its demand.

In human relationships “compromise” is frequently said to be an agreement that no party is happy with, this is because the parties involved often feel that they either gave away too much or that they received too little.
-Ye Olde Wikipedia

Since this is really not a secret anymore and rumors suck, I’m going to go ahead and talk about it.  Perhaps having it out in the open will help-perhaps not.  If nothing else perhaps someone else can learn from the situation.  I’ll try to portray it in as neutral as a tone as I can.  In no way shape or form do I intend to villainize anyone involved.

GMing is hard work.  Many people eventually give up and move on-either disbanding the guild or handing it to a successor.  If I recall our history correctly, Steve isn’t even the Brotherhood of Oblivion’s first GM.

Anyway, sometime back in…November, I believe, Steve gave in to the stress of GMing and handed the guild to me.  I am not the best GM.  I try, but I have my weaknesses just like anyone else.  I hold things together through as much charm as skill.   But only a few months later Steve started to…regret his decision.  He’d had time to relax, let go, and step back and see things.  The guild meant a lot to him, and being a mere officer wasn’t satisfying the itch.

Enter Instant Sucky Situation.

You’ve handed someone-a RL friend, even-your guild.  They seem to somewhat relish leading it and aren’t doing a bad job but you want it back.  You know it.  They know it.   You know you should probably let it go but damn it, the guild means a lot to you.

What would you do?  As either party?

If it was anyone else asking for the guild back, I’d tell them to go to hell.  But it’s Steve.  Even though we sometimes don’t see eye to eye, he’s our friend and lives across the damn street.   The guild does mean a lot to him.

If he wants it back and I don’t want to step down, the “obvious” solution is co-GMing.  I’ve co-GMed before, and gotten backstabbed.  I’ve watched previous guilds be co-GM’d by two and even three people and those were…not rousing successes.  I’ll openly admit that I’m dubious about doing any such thing even with Steve.

But in the end…I care about people.  Often I care far more about other people than myself, to my own detriment.  I don’t want Steve unhappy.  Even though this compromise, this feeling out leadership together and figuring out if we can do it without wanting to shank each other, is not my favored solution…oh, well.

Compromise: where you get some of what you want, but not all of it.

Will it work in guild leadership?  Er…we’ll see.

ETA: For now, I retain the sole GM title.  This is more of a…behind the scenes co-GMship at the moment.  If I think it is in the best interests of the guild to not go through with this, then we won’t.  It’s just an…interesting situation all around.

Now I am going to use…a few more ellipses…just to annoy…Pixelated Executioner.

Success in the Face of Failure

Brotherhood of Oblivion: failing where we should succeed, and suceeding where we should fail!

On Thursday night we had two potential recruits listening on vent.  This meant one thing for sure: the night was going to go to hell.

I hummed to myself and made some flower wreaths for the handbasket.

First of all, Tim, one of our intrepid DPSers, had himself a non-working OS because he’s just clever like that.  Cranky Tank mosied over across the street to fix it before raid time…and bricked the mother board.

Slick, my love.

So we’re down a tank, a DPS, and…our other tank, as Steve’s computer is drafted while they try to fix Tim’s.  This leaves us our tank with strength gems in his gear and Andy, who’s been retired from tanking for awhile.

Right, so, no continuing ICC25 for us!  14 manning Naxx25 for the weekly raid quest seems like a splendi…

…Hunt just pulled an extra spider pack and we wiped.  Okay.  Well, let’s recover from that and go on to Anub, shall we?

Anub is easy sauce, it should just be a matter of-

…did we all just die?  We all just fucking died!

Fail.

Well, Steve’s here now, let’s 15 man it, then.  We magically succeed this time, and reform into an ICC 10.  Steve wants to bring his warlock and the warlock wants to bring his shaman.  For some reason I say what the hell, and off we go.

To wipe on Marrowgar.

Well, fuck.  Okay.  So we regroup and stomp him into the ground, and then proceed to…wipe on Lady Deathwhisper after one of the tanks unexpectedly goes down to a Hulk.

(Me, mid raid: are those big green things wearing purple shorts?  Raid: Yes.  Me: …)

So we regroup again, down the Lich Bitch, and head to Gunship!  One of the tanks dies on the way because I paused to eat chocolate.  Mm, chocolate.  Okay, so, we get to gunship and…

…the warlock smears himself on the deck, because that’s what warlocks do.  The DPS left loses control of the adds on that ship, the tank goes down, and we…wipe on Gunship.

We wipe on the mother fucking boat!

This does lead to the amusing discovery that you don’t die if you’re in a cannon.  This comes in handy for when we make our-by this point required-wipe on Saurfang (at something like 4% even).  Yes, I ran the fuck away from the boss to hide in a cannon.  This was after yelling at the rogue and hunter for hiding in the cannons when they can get out of death some other way.  Bitches!  MY WAY TO CHEAT DEATH GTFO.

So after dying our way through farm content, will all sorts of insanity on vent, you’d think the recruits would be smart and run away, right?

…no, they went ahead and transferred.

I invited them in the middle of our third wipe in an all guild Heroic CoS.

Yes, we even failed at H CoS (did you know that if you do the gaunlet without talking to Arthas, talking to him makes more elites spawn?  Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaah don’t send your healer). 

I love my guild.  I don’t always know why, but I love them.

The Telephone Game

Does anyone remember the telephone game, or operator, or whatever the hell it was called?  One person whispered something in the ear of the person next to them, and so on, until by the time it got to the end it sounded nothing like the original?

That very much happens.   Person A says something to person B, who says something to person C (for Cranky Tank), who says something to person D (for…nothing, but it’s me) because well, he lives with person D and tells them everything sooner or later.  Person D flails and person A goes wait, what? 

…I was going somewhere with that, but I was interrupted by work and now have no idea.  Hmm.  Well, raiding with family is interesting, to be sure.  If you tell Josh something, it’ll get back to me sooner or later becuase…well, he’s my boyfriend, we just babble everything at each other.  We’ll keep things to ourselves if you tell us to, but if you don’t?  Pffft!  Now I’ve added my little sister to the mix, which is fun in and of itself.  She’s sweet, but definitely a loud, sometimes obnoxious teenager.  Oh, and a bit of a NubKnight still, to be sure.  She signs up for raids and shows up on time though-this puts her steps ahead of some people already!

The problem is that because she can be loud and obnoxious, she can be…well, annoying, and people won’t complain to me about it.  No, they complain to someone else.  By the time it filters back to me, though (which…it will!) it’s gone from “Damn, she talks too much sometimes” to “So-and-so hates your sister.” 

/facepalm

And people wonder why I’d rather just have them tell me this shit directly…

How To Express An Opinion Without Being A Dick II

Dear Children Masquerading As Raiders And Even Officers In My Guild,

Can you grow the fuck up?  Look, I realize that So and So has an opinion you don’t agree with.  I realize that he has all the tact of a 16 year old in the middle of an emo fit with his parents sometimes.  But that doesn’t mean that you have carte blanche to turn around and act 5, instead. You can damn well put your epeens away and cut out the snide remarks.  It doesn’t help, and it doesn’t make you look better, nevermind right.  And when two of you are officers and in the middle of a raid, you really have no fucking excuse.

God damn, people.

Maybe said person needs to be removed from the guild, maybe he just causes too much strife because we’re not a good fit for him but, damn.  Again, not permission to act like children yourselves.   You can take your dodge/parry/stam stacking bloodshed somewhere else, and not during raid time.

RAWR.

-Angry Healer with the GM Hat

Emoquitting and You

1) Don’t do it.  There’s better ways to go out. 
2) Definitely don’t do it repetedly.
3) Especially not in the same guild.
4) The GM may keep inviting you back, but everyone else might well start to think you’re a bundle of loldrama.

/stares

And in more random WTFery, I honestly have these conversations with some of you folks:

Kyrilean:  yellow
 me:  what?
 me:  blue?  green?  purple?
 Kyrilean:  the phone goes “green”, i “pink” it up, and say “yellow”
 me:  …  WTF
Kyrilean:  a 2nd grade elementary teacher asks her class to use three words in a sentence: green, pink, and yellow
teacher says, “Susie, please use those three words in a sentence.”
Susie says, “My dress is green. My crayon is pink. The sun is yellow.”
“Very good,” says the teacher
me:  but that’s three sentences
 Kyrilean:  “Jose,” says the teacher, “please use those three words in a sentence.”
Jose thinks a moment.
And then says, “The phone goes green, I pink it up, and say yellow.”
you must say that last part with an accent btw
think Speedy Gonzalez :)
me:  you are so not PC
 Kyrilean:  I’m a mac
 me:  I’m blogging this
 Kyrilean:  shit

I will not share the god awful jokes I heard after that.   You’re welcome.

25s: wooooo!

So last night, BoO made its return to 25s.

Yaaaaaay!

We still need some solid DPS-we pugged a couple, some of our own still need work, and some alts made appearances.  Of course part of the alt fun was because two nublettes decided that it was okay to take their healer mains to a pug Ulduar25 since OMG we have so many heals right?  …and then we’re short a healer come the night of our run.  

Don’t do that.  You know who you are and you of all people should know better.  :P  Yes, we have more healers than you can shake a stick at.  Yes, you have alts that are capable of going into Ulduar25.  But you have no idea if one of our other healers might have connection issues, wife aggro, kid aggro, or whatever at the last minute.   Save your god damn mains for god damned guild runs. 

Let me tell you, the last thing I want on what is still progression content is Josh healing.  Not because Josh isn’t a fine holy paladin-he is-but because I want him tanking.  

Besides, on his pally Josh gets all up in my healing business.  “I think that not having healing assignments on this was a bad idea.”  Really?  It was a one tank fight  (pummelbot bitch doesn’t really count).  Do I have to explicitly tell you that you’re a tank healer and should therefore be on the tank?  And that the raid healers should be on the raid?  Hello?  /thwack 

If we have an excess of tank healers (and we did, last night) then I’m going to be the one on raid bitch duty.  This is fine with me as I’m the most used to it.  I really want to push the tanks to be comfortable with Celaeno, anyway.  Know the Celaeno, love the Celaeno.  I am not the only disc priest.  I do not want to be the only disc priest.   Feel the warm embrace of the other disc priest’s bubbles…  They seem a bit insecure sometimes because she’s not on vent (with reason), but they’ll have to get over it.  I’ll make them.  >:|  

I’m not sure if my tendency to hand out similar healing assignments is good, or bad.  Familiarity vs boredom?  I’m most likely to assign Kotakh the floating “assist on the tanks but watch the raid”  because I know he’ll be on top of it.  And well…raid is raid.  I could switch up the tank assignments, but…Josh wants me healing him.  So.  You try to work with that and make it interesting, damn it!

Insanity is Contagious

I love my guild.  I bitch about them, sure-we have this collection of some of the most derp derp people ever-but they’re adorablederp derp people.  Hell, sometimes I am one of those people (see: walking into Vezax trash). 

We’re all so delightfully nutty.  Sometimes perhaps not so delightfully, depending on how funny you think talking about poop on vent is, but you get the idea.  Last night, we assembled our first 25 man raid for awhile-on an off night!  So we trundled on over to Ony and I proceeded to make my usual threat, just tweaked slightly for the instance:

“If you get tail whipped into the whelp caves EVERY BLOGGER in the guild will post mocking you!”

Considering that there’s uh…five of us?  Yeah!  That threat carries five times more weight than before!  Of course, 5 x 0 = 0 still but whatever.  :P

Brotherhood of Oblivion: We Collect Bloggers!

We never did down Ony (a post in and of itself), but it was nice to have a full 25 man run again.  We’re almost there again!  I just need recruit people to shore up our weak spots, and we should be able to resume our 25 man raiding.  Now if I can just get the people we have to not stand in bad places (says the priest who ate part of a deep breath or two-BUT IT DOESN’T COUNT IF YOU DON’T DIE).

It’s also really hard to be frustrated with your GM when he replies to your complaints of “You never listen to me, Steve!” with “That’s not true!  I listened to you once like, 7 or 8 months ago!” and then proceeds to go on about how he wants to be portrayed as an evil dictator, or something.   Fine, Steve, I can help with that! I have this whole collection of tags for you already!  :P  And then Ky complained that his tag wasn’t big enough in my tag cloud, and…

See what I have to deal with?!

I may not be doing hardmodes, I may not be on the bleeding edge of raiding, but I’m having fun with a lot of awesome goofballs.  Even if the GM is a meaniehead, and decided to play his priest when we could practically comprise a 10 man raid of just priests…

I call disc priest tank, yo.

Noob priests are so adorable!

So over the weekend my GM finally got around to dinging his priest 80.  He was a solid priest in BC, but as anyone who played a priest back then knows (disclaimer: not me!), it’s a pretty different kettle of fish.

It was basically a lot of OMG GREATER HEAL IS SO EXPENSIVE WAI. 

Then I went LOL SILLY PRIESTY YOU DON’T USE THAT ANYMORE.

Half the problem is that he’s trying to juggle both disc and holy specs, a feat that isn’t easy for the freshly dinged priest because they do have different stat priorities.  I had an easier time of it because I’d collected a decent amount of gear despite a certain mage being a lootwhore.

He’s feeling the mana nerfs….but then he’s also jumping into ToC already, which on heroic is an instance that can drive even Lyrandre to dig into her bag of mana tricks (my fiend is named Bob).  The bonus of this is that he may finally stop thinking that replen is OPTIONAL. 

…

Alright fellow healers, you can stop shuddering now.  We’ll cross our fingers and hope for the best, alright?

I’m still a little baffled that guildies come to me for priest advice.  In some part of my mind, I’m still the holy paladin flailing her way through priestlyness.   Go to Ron for advice, not…oh, right he’s not here anymore.  Well then, er, ah…um…

Hmm.

Fuck!

“Amber, don’t you blog about priest stuff?”

Well, yeah, but…oh, shut up.  It’s one thing to be one more healer blog on the internet and another to be my guild’s priest guru.  The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, I tell you.

Ultimately I figured that the baby priest advice was similar to the baby paladin advice: stack SP.  The rest will come with time!   Not much time, either, considering how hard he’s hitting ToC.  That place has some damn tasty gear.

…this does remind me that I need to update my guides…especially the paladin one.  Meep!

/sulk

This post is to pout that Mach commented on Mikata’s blog and not mine.

POUTING DO YOU HEAR ME STEVE.

/abuses tags

Be afraid! Muhahahaha.

Our dear Macharious is taking a temporary break from GMing, leaving the guild in the hands of his…intrepid officers.

Excuse me while I sit here and giggle like a madwoman.

The first thing I did upon learning this was take a collective look at “the boys” as I call them.  Then I rolled my eyes and decided that if I didn’t take over, we wouldn’t get anything done.  Obviously.  Not that I’m declaring myself acting GM or anything I’m just…looking around for my pointy stick, to make best use of my passive nagging bonus.

Between myself, Andy, and Josh (sorry Hunt, you don’t count), we’ll chug along nicely.  We’ll probably see a return to 10 man content, just because having two of our tanks on hiatus is…well, having half of our tanks on hiatus.  Of course I do have other outside tanks to tap so…we shall see, we shall see.  I’d like to continue with 25s but then we’d need more DPS and healers to actually…sign up. 

The shift in guild ranks and the bank will still occur as planned, and BoO will buckle down.  We’re still a “casual progression raid” but we’ll be a casual progression raid that won’t tolerate people being being lazy dumb fucks.  This shall please me greatly.

One of our recruits, bless her transferring heart, was speaking to me the other night.   She keeps tabs on the blogs (hi!) and the forums and was a wee bit concerned.

The tide of stress has been running high amongst the officers of late.  It’s an unfortunate fact that, with so many of us being RL pals, and two of the officers being co-workers, that the RL burden on one is often shared at least in part by the others.  But I’ve seen this guild chug through drama that would have seriously rocked others.  In fact, I bet that large portions of the guild remain mostly unaware of some of the waves that the officers have been wading through over the past few months, aside from a slight roister shift.  This is nothing!  The man needs a damn break but the guild isn’t go anywhere.

I might threaten to rename it the Sisterhood of Oblivion though.  Just sayin’.